America's Missionary Evangelicalism in Sinclair Lewis's The God-Seeker

AMERICA'S MISSIONARY EVANGELICALISM IN SINCLAIR LEWIS'S THE GOD-SEEKER Albert H. Tricomi Binghamton University Published near the end of Lewis's career in 1949 on a subject no one ever expected from him, The God-Seekerhas sometimes been taken as an unimportant, antiquarian novel.1 But its much misunderstood and underappreciated subject is really the nature of American idealism and ideology, whose soul, Lewis believed, was still being formed. Set for the most part on the Minnesota frontier in the late 1840s, The God-Seeker renders in extensive detail the core beliefs and trials of those missionaries whose frontier work was supported by the American Board Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), an organization that from 1812 sent its missionaries to every kind of frontier post in America and beyond. More seasoned and psychologically complex than Lewis's better known, topical potboiler on religious revivalism in America, Elmer Gantry (1927), The God-Seeker is not a novel of religious hypocrisy, nor is it principally a piece of propaganda or a "tract," to use Sheldon Grebstein's useful category of classification.2 Rather, it is a probing historical novel that gauges the insidious effects of an inflexible religious ideology upon the indigenous Indians and, ultimately, upon the missionaries themselves. The interplay between missionary religious ideology on the one hand and the opportunism of commercial entrepreneurs, settlers, and military nationalists, on the other, as they mutually affect the lives of the Dakota Sioux is one of the novel's important contributions to a critical understanding of America as a "promised land" and "crusader state."3 To historicize The God-Seekerin this ideological way is to understand more deeply not only the cultural and political moment Lewis depicted, but also the moment in which Lewis himself was writing. This post-war period was one of rising domestic tensions over racial segregation. When the Democratic party at its convention in 1948 adopted a pro-civil rights platform, the old alliance Franklin Roosevelt had forged between progressive Northerners and conservative Southerners shattered. Famously, Strom Thurmond, then Governor of South Carolina, walked out of the convention with a substantial number of disaffected delegates from the Deep South called "Dixiecrats" and proceeded to run for President of the United States as a pro-Jim Crow segregationist on the States Rights' Democratic Party ticket. Internationally , this period was also fraught with tension over the United 68Albert H. Tricomi States's "Cold War"confrontation with an emergent Soviet Union, which American politicians described as a battle between the godfearing , "free world" and the atheistic, subversive followers of Communism .4 The hovering presence of these contexts in the novel reveals Lewis's commitment to what I would call "deep fictional historicism," not just the fictional re-enactment of historical events (the novel is thoroughly grounded in that), but also the determined exploration, mostly by innuendo and topical echoes, of America's missionary ideology as it reveals itself in recurring patterns over time. Such a history is capable of demonstrating how the "character" and ideology of one era continues to reverberate in later ones, albeit with new applications . In particular, The God-Seeker attempts to present a foundational account of American culture beginning in the early nineteenth century and proceeding through the year 1853. However, at strategic points its language becomes proleptic, as the novel suggests mid-twentieth century contexts for America's missionary idealism. Lewis's historical novel also continues to resound beyond its date of publication to our present historical moment, and although I make only passing reference to the novel's contemporary relevance in this essay, I will at least point out in this place that American missionary ideology continues to exert its influence over the national psyche in the evangelical policies of the second Bush administration, which in 2004 enjoyed the decisive support and pervasive media notice of evangelical Christians in its war for "freedom" and "universal human rights" against alien regimes in Afghanistan and the Middle-East. I make this still topical point to underscore a conceptual one, that cultural studies theorists often gauge the cultural power of a literary work by its ability to endure over time.5 By this standard as well I...